


rabbit hole

by lizzieraindrops



Series: A midnight study in purple [8]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, posted before s4 so TECHNICALLY no OBs4 spoilers....., reference to Helsinki #2 spoilers, reference to Helsinki #3 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 17:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6574807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzieraindrops/pseuds/lizzieraindrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth and MK's first face-to-face meeting. Same universe as <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5735857">contact</a>.</p><p>A last-minute fic posted only hours before the s4 premiere. Originally posted <a href="http://lizzieraindrops.tumblr.com/post/142803554279/rabbit-hole-1815-words">on tumblr</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rabbit hole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cestmabiologie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestmabiologie/gifts).



She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t under _stand_. She’s still treating this like a common police investigation. As if the masters of this endlessly complex dance were mere everyday convicts she could chase and capture and compel; not an incomprehensibly huge and omnipresent network of corporate shapeshifters with the resources and ruthlessness to make the world burn. **  
**

Veera wraps her arms tightly around herself and bows her head. She needs to tell her. Beth needs to know what they did. What they can do again.

Veera’s never told anyone. The last time she told somebody something no one else knew, she died and the spilled secret died with her. Vanishing like the tide into the sea, along with six other identical bodies.

{      _(She misses her. So much.)_      }

 _We must meet_ , she types in a rapid flurry of keys.  _In person_. Send. The instant message makes a little  _swoosh_  noise as it’s transmitted. Veera wrinkles her nose and mutes the audio on her computer.

She doesn’t yet know what she’ll say to her. How can she distill twelve years’ worth of unspeakable grief and unshowable fear into a simple cautionary fable? Especially when words were never her friend anyway. And she has never, before or since what happened in 

{   _helsinki_     }

had a friend who stays by her side when they leave her.

 

***

 

There are faint fingers of mist grasping at the door of the Jag as Beth slams it shut. At dusk, the woods of the park where she runs look like a horror movie waiting to happen. But better this than the 45-minute drive to the rendezvous point MK originally wanted. At least Beth managed to talk her into a meeting in her general neighborhood. The girl is paranoid. It’s making Beth herself a little edgy.

With the car turned off, the cloud of silence that emanates from the woods is anything but. The early-autumn chorus of insects trilling is somehow amplified by the humidity; it makes everything feel too close.

Beth buttons her long coat tightly across her chest to keep out the mist.

She doesn’t know if MK has arrived yet - she is a bit early, after all - but Beth’s instincts say she has. Her wariness has been well whetted on the beat, and rarely leads her wrong.

Beth hears a leafy rustle, then a tiny brittle  _snap!_  Her shoulder blades pull together, bracing for action, and her heart rate accelerates. Just a few beats per minute more. She’s ready to finally meet this elusive contact.

She turns on one heel toward the source of the sound, a bit to the left. Beth doesn’t want to bring fire into this fight - if it is one - but her hand drifts toward the gun at her hip nonetheless. She still doesn’t know why this  “MK” is helping her, and Beth doesn’t trust motives she doesn’t know.

“I’m not armed,” says a light voice from the shadows. She may as well have said  _Don’t hurt me_.

And there she is. Stepping out from between the mist-wreathed trees as if from a storybook. Beth feels her eyebrows inching upward as she registers a ghostly pale, inhuman face beneath a dusky purple hood. A white sheep mask.

“MK?” she asks.

The masked face nods. “Come. Into the woods. I don’t want these words to be overheard.” She has a lilting accent: Finnish, perhaps.

Beth shakes her head. “Not without a gesture of good faith.” She feels adrenaline in her bloodstream but holds still, balancing her body in that perfect place between light toes and grounded soles.

The hooded figure lets out a small sigh, muffled by the mask, and hangs her head as if resigned. She’s small, no larger than Beth herself. The motion only makes her look smaller. She raises both of her sleeved arms in perfect synchrony. Her fingers delicately pull the mask aside to reveal the left half of her face. She stands stock-still with her shoulders curled forward and her forearms held close to her chest, clutching the mask. Waiting.

Beth’s eyes widen.

She hadn’t realized MK was another clone.

She vanishes behind the mask again the instant she registers Beth’s reaction. Shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders, like a ruffled bird resettling its feathers. “Now come,” she says shortly. She turns around and starts walking.

Beth follows.

 

***

 

The closeness of footsteps behind her nags at Veera’s flight instinct, and she’s glad when she can turn around to face Beth again.

She’s led her to the most unsightly and inconveniently dense part of this meager little wood: nothing like the forests of her homeland. The last of the evening light is almost gone, so she fetches the lantern from her backpack and sets it dimmed on the ground between them. Beth merely watches her, a faintly lit face trailing long, dark hair and a long, dark coat.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were one of us?”

“Because I don’t tell anybody.”

{      _(But I don’t talk about it - ever. So never mention it, okay?!)_      }

Veera shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to be alive.”

“Why?”

“Because I learned too much. And for that they kill you.” She looks up at Beth. “You must never let them know how much you know. They’ll kill you, too.”

“Who?”

“Watchers. Anyone close to you. You all have them.”

Beth doesn’t reply. Her face is neutral, and Veera can’t tell what she’s thinking. Beth takes a deep breath and slips her hands into her coat pockets.

“MK,” she begins, “Don’t take this the wrong way… I know you’re serious, but how do I know you’re not just being paranoid?”

Veera’s stomach twists, and her face grows warm under the mask. She scuffs a furrow in the soil with the toe of her sneaker. Beth doesn’t quite believe her, yet. And she hasn’t done a good job of convincing her that she needs to. But Beth’s life, and those of the handful of local identicals she’s in contact with, depend on it.

“I asked you to come so I could tell you. To make you understand why you must be careful.”

Veera shoves her fists into the pockets of her hoodie and begins pacing back and forth on her side of the lantern.

“Twelve years ago. 2001. I found another of us. And then another. And then more.” She falls into a comfortable pattern of steps and the words fall out of her faster and faster. “We realized that they were using us for their experiments. Do you ever dream about strange hospitals? Wake up with unexplained cuts on your skin? Find bruises or puncture wounds on your arms, like you’ve had blood drawn?” She glances at Beth. Until now, she’s been cautious but unafraid. Now, her eyebrows are slightly contracted in guarded uncertainty. She’s shaken. 

Veera looks at her feet and continues. “They were abducting some of us for more intensive testing. It was fatal. So six of us tried to go public to protect ourselves.” Suddenly, the words stop again, stuck in her tight throat. She swallows in a vain attempt to clear it. “I - am the only one left.”

“What happened?” Beth asks quietly. It’s not a scratching whisper, but a secretive sound, soft and low. Veera feels the resonance of it in her own identical throat, and tries to pitch her voice to match it.

“All dead.” Veera’s voice breaks, and at the same time, something inside her chest breaks. She halts in her pacing but her mind races ever faster. She’s spent all these years not thinking about it

{   _(We watch each other’s backs. That’s what friends do.)_      }

because she _can’t_  think about it but Beth is doing exactly the same thing  _she_  did and she’s going to get them all killed  _again_  and it’s going to be all her fault  _again_ and there’s too much water in her eyes and her nose and she can’t breathe behind this stupid mask - 

Veera tears the mask off her face and throws it aside. Slips out of the pinning straps of her backpack and lets it fall. She drops to the ground, clamps her knees into her chest, but it’s too late. The sobs tearing their way out of her body have only grown stronger during their confinement. She’s just kelp in the tide.

She hears footsteps coming past the lantern toward her, and she knows they’re soft, but they sound so loud. She flinches away from them because she  _can’t_  be touched right now, she can’t.

The movement is more pronounced than she had intended, but it’s not like she has very good motor control right now, with her every bone and fiber shaking or aching or breaking. She lurches sideways and falls, catching herself on her hands. “Whoa, it’s okay,” Beth says in that same low voice, stopping not a metre away. She squats down in front of her, the hem of her fine wool coat skimming the dirt. Veera hides her face in her hands and curls her legs up beneath her.

“MK, it’s alright, I’m listening to you.”

Veera peers at her through her fingers, but the eye contact is too much, and she closes hers.

 

***

 

Beth waits for MK’s body-wracking sobs to subside. They’re a little frightening, tearing their way out of her former delicate wariness. But Beth has seen far worse things than this. Her line of work exposes her to the worst sides of people.

Or so she thought. She’s beginning to have doubts about the true depths of human depravity.

MK’s hood has fallen down, and her messy shoulder-length curls are quaking with her unexpected outpouring of grief. She rocks back and forth slightly. Once her breathing returns halfway to something like regular, she sniffles, “You have to be careful. Or they’ll all die. Please…”

The sheer desperation in that plea tugs at Beth like a crowbar caught under her ribcage. “I will,” Beth says, swallowing. “I’ll protect them. But I need to know more. I need to know what the dangers are.” Through the fabric of her coat, her fingers have started tapping a restless rhythm against her thigh. “Tell me how.” She keeps her voice soft so as not to spook her. She’s as flighty as a wild horse.

“You can’t trust anyone,” she says. She slowly lowers her shaky hands from her face without looking up. The right side of her face is covered with what looks like burn scars. “You’re all being watched. You have someone assigned to watch you. Always. As part of the experiments. Someone close to you. That’s how they work.”

Beth’s chest collapses like there’s a sudden vacuum inside it.

Between one instant and the next, Beth realizes that all her worst buried, nagging, paranoid, irrational fears are true.

{      _Paul -_      }

“No,” she whispers out loud.

She feels the truths on which she’s built her life crumbling into lies, and she’s falling.

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Nina, who let me bounce ideas for this fic off her, and who has been unbelievably supportive of all my Veera writing and general fangirling.


End file.
